Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom

Author:Marilyn Yalom [Yalom, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-09-14T18:30:00+00:00

The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess

The most remarkable manifestation of the overlap between chess and love is found in a treatise with the intriguing title Le Livre des Echecs Amoureux Moralisés, loosely translated as The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess. There are several things one must know before tackling this extraordinary work. It was written around 1400 by Evrart de Conty, a physician associated with the University of Paris and with the court of the French king Charles VI. Conty did not invent the titillating combination of words Echecs Amoureux. That belonged to an earlier writer who had composed an allegorical poem with this title around 1370. Whereas the earlier poet did not become sufficiently famous for his name to have endured, Evrart de Conty’s prose commentary on the poem became an instant success and has survived in several manuscripts.

First we must take a look at the earlier work to understand the second. The following synopsis is based on the Dresden manuscript, which was tragically destroyed during the fire bombings at the end of World War II.16 It tells how the narrator as a young man was sent by Venus on a mission to find a lady worthy of his love. The lady was to be found in the garden of Venus’s son, Deduit—a garden already famous from the late medieval French allegory The Romance of the Rose.

When the narrator found the maiden in Deduit’s garden, they played against each other using pieces bearing insignias that evoked stages in the course of love—for example, turtledoves, lambs, and rings, or, conversely, panthers and serpents. The lady’s pieces were made of precious stones, such as diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires, with rubies for the queen (fierge). The narrator’s chessmen were made of gold. To make a long story short, the narrator was so enraptured by his female opponent that he lost the game. He was subsequently comforted by the God of Love, who lauded his courage and gave him instruction for future conduct. The rest of this very long poem is both a manual for lovers and a compendium of knowledge concerning everything from health and education to politics, religion, knighthood, music, marriage, wet nursing, and Parisian living. As such, it constitutes a precious repository of late fourteenth-century popular wisdom.

Conty took up Les Echecs Amoureux with the stated intention of rendering it clearer in prose. But he went far beyond his initial goal, with additions that made his “commentary” a formidable allegorical work in and of itself. His enthusiasm for the project is evident from the start when he says of chess that it is, of all games, “the most beautiful, the most marvelous, and the one that offers the most affinities with love.” 17

In the sixth part of this exceptionally long work, the part that is devoted exclusively to “The Chess Board and the Chess Match,” Conty argues that chess can be compared to love because both are predicated on a series of battles. The battles, as one astute critic has recently

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